Industrial relations tend to be better in countries, industries and companies where communications are good, i.e., where management consult workers on matters that will concern them, where neither side treats the other as an adversary, and when unions do not insist upon the preservation of completely uneconomic jobs and working practices. Although some employers and managers (and political parties) oppose the very existence of unions – even though, like doctors, lawyers, accountants and so on, they might themselves belong to a professional association with similar basic aims – many management theorists stress the necessity of unions. In the 1970s, Peter Drucker wrote that ‘Management is and has to be a power. Any power needs restraint and control – or else it becomes tyranny. The union serves an essential function in industrial society’. Yet one of the chief objectives of right-wing governments in the 1980s (e.g. in Britain and the USA) was to diminish the power of trade unions, and to deregulate labour markets in accordance with the ideal of free markets.